The Membership Card

Chapter 4: A Very Short Fortune

I smiled and gave her the same look right back.

"Wish I could help."

"Don't." Chloe's jaw was tight. "You carry bags worth ten grand like it's nothing. Don't tell me you can't put together fifty."

"Didn't you spend all semester telling people my bags were fake?"

I shrugged.

"A girl who buys fakes. Doesn't it make sense she's broke?"

"You—"

Nothing came out. Her eyes were red and getting redder, and any second now one of them was going to spill.

"So that's what this is." Her voice cracked on it. "You're punishing me for what I said about your bag."

"I didn't say that."

"You are. You've been sitting on it this whole—"

"I don't care about the bag," I said. "I've seen the real one. That's all I ever said. I don't care."

"Then why—"

"I just don't want to pay for you."

That stopped her cold.

Behind her, people started up.

"It's a duffel bag. That's what this is about? You're going to hold thirty people up over a duffel bag?"

"Seriously. Some people have no—"

"No wonder nobody wants to hang out with you."

I turned around and looked at the three of them.

"How much did you have last night?"

"Excuse me?"

"You were there. You ate, you drank, you took a bottle home." I pointed at each of them in turn. "Every single one of you took a bottle home. So if she can't cover it, who should? You."

They started to answer.

"Before you say you don't have it—" I kept going. "You don't have fifty. Fine. Split it thirty ways. What's that, seventeen hundred? For a dinner you already ate?"

Somebody behind them said something I didn't catch.

"You're all upperclassmen. Nobody's got seventeen hundred?"

The lobby went quiet.

Maya got there first.

"Funny how loud it was when it was her money."

Priya came in right on top of her. "And now it's everybody's money and everybody's quiet."

"Nobody's asking you two."

"Nobody's asking anyone," Priya said. "That's the problem, right? Nobody can answer."

A couple of people in the back were suddenly very interested in their phones.

"Ma'am." The clerk had been standing at the edge of all this with her hands folded, and now she unfolded them. "I need the balance settled."

Chloe turned on her.

"I heard you."

"I have to ask again." The clerk turned her phone around so we could all see it — the dial pad up, a one, a one, zero, waiting. "Otherwise I make a call."

Nobody said anything.

I looked at Maya and Priya.

"So, out of curiosity," I said. "That much money, unpaid — what's that look like? Legally."

Maya already had her phone out. Priya leaned over her shoulder.

Maya read it off. "Felony theft, over a certain amount."

"How much time?"

"Depends. Three years minimum. Ten on the top end."

Chloe heard every word. Her face went from red to white in about two seconds.

She turned back to the crowd.

"Look, I just — I can't do it right now. Okay? I can't get it out this second." She was talking fast now. "So here's what we do. We take the bottles back, we return every bottle, and then whatever's left we split. All of us. I'll get it from my dad and I'll pay every one of you back the second I have it."

Thirty people did the math at the same time.

"Return the bottles," somebody said flatly.

"Frame it however you want," Chloe said. "It's still like nine hundred apiece—"

"No."

It was the guy closest to the door. He had his keys out already.

"I'm a normal person. I get fifteen hundred a month from my parents. I don't have nine hundred for your party."

More voices piled on.

"You said it was on you."

"You invited us. There's no way I'm paying for this."

"If you couldn't cover it you shouldn't have—"

Chloe's face kept changing, one insult landing after another.

"Erin."

She turned to the person standing nearest her — the one who'd been at her elbow the whole afternoon, who'd laughed at every joke.

"Erin, come on."

Erin let Chloe's hand land on her arm, and then she pulled the arm back. Almost gently. Like she was being careful not to tear anything.

"You know I'm on aid, right?" Erin said. "Like, actual aid. I can't do this."

"Erin—"

"I'm not paying. Not one dollar." She picked up her bag. "And the party's over, so."

She walked out.

Two guys near the door looked at each other and followed her. One of them had a bottle in each hand and didn't put either down.

"I've got a paper due—"

"Yeah, me too, I should—"

"I'll see you guys around."

Half a minute. That's how long it took for all thirty of them to get out through a pair of double doors, and not one of them stopped at the desk.

Chloe grabbed for the last one. The guy shook her off hard enough that she went down on her backside on the marble and sat there.

By the time she got up they were gone.

"Stop them!"

She spun around, shouting at the clerk.

"Your security, go get them, they're taking the bottles—"

The clerk didn't move.

"I'm sorry," she said. "The reservation is in your name. You told us, repeatedly, that you'd be covering everyone at this table. We're not permitted to detain other guests."

"You—"

Chloe looked around the empty lobby. That was the last of it. Whatever she'd been holding up went.

"Fine," she said. "Fine. They walked out on your watch, so that's on you. I'm not paying. Call whoever you want. Arrest all of us."

Then something moved behind her eyes.

"Actually, no." She pointed at me. "The card's hers."

I didn't move.

"It's her card. It's on the reservation, she's the member. Bill her."

Maya got there first.

"You ran up fifty grand and you want to hang it on her? Say that again."

"Say it again," Priya said. "Because two minutes ago you swore up and down you never touched the card. You called it her paranoia. You said she was sick for even bringing it up."

"I borrowed it."

Chloe said it flat, looking at the clerk and not at us at the same time. "That's all. I borrowed it."

Any other resort, that might have worked. Front desk turns to the member of record.

This one had my last name on the deed.

"Stop talking to her," I said. "Make the call."

The clerk dialed.

Chloe stood very still, pretending she hadn't heard the ring.

An hour. Two officers, then four, a second car, the drive to the substation, the folder, the questions — none of it worth the space it takes to write down. What mattered was what came after, and that was the part I was still standing in the doorway for.

"Then let me talk to the owner. Not the front desk. The owner."

I came off the wall.

"My parents own the resort."

She stared.

"Which makes me the person handling this," I said.

It took a second to land. I watched it land.

"You're—"

Her mouth stayed open.

"You knew," she said. "The whole time. You knew the card couldn't pay for any of it, you knew I was—you let me walk in there with your key card and plan a whole party on it. On purpose. You set this up."

"I didn't set anything up."

"You sat there in the lobby and let it happen."

"I didn't let it happen. I let you do what you were going to do."

"That's the same—"

"It isn't. You took the card. I didn't give it to you." I counted it off on my fingers. "You took it out of my room. You walked into the lobby and booked thirty seats on it. You stood up and told all of them it was on you. I told you, straight, before any of it, that the discount card wouldn't cover a party and that if it went wrong you'd be the one in the chair. You went ahead. Those are all there. On camera."

"I'm going to sue you. I'm going to—you entrapped me."

"For what? Taking my key card? That's a you problem."

"You planned this whole—"

"Name one thing I did."

She couldn't. She'd been running into the same wall since noon, and the wall was boring: it had her on tape walking into a lobby with a stolen card and ordering a party for thirty people, and nowhere on the tape was anything I'd done to her.

They let everyone go. No charge, no bail, nothing filed. One of the officers said it was civil, "for now," and didn't say anything about later, and I noticed she didn't.

Chloe walked out alone.

The room change request took two weeks. All of us filed it the same afternoon — Maya and Priya and me and, because there were four beds in that suite and Chloe had one of them, whoever filled hers. Housing did the thing where they pretend there's a process. In the end they moved us across the quad into a building with no carpet and one working elevator, and someone else got the fourth bed, and that was the end of it.

The rest of it happened without me.

Nobody sat with her. That was the first thing, and it wasn't organized, it just happened. She'd come into the dining hall and the tables didn't have room. She'd sit down in a lecture row and the seats next to her would stay empty in a way that couldn't be a coincidence by about the third week.

She wanted the bottles back.

She caught two of them outside the library — the same two who'd been loudest in the lobby — and asked where the bottles were. The taller one shrugged.

"What bottles?"

"You know what bottles."

"I didn't take anything."

"You were holding two of them when you walked out the door."

"I don't know what you're talking about." And then, because she kept standing there, "You wanted to host. You hosted. Nobody asked you to come around asking for your party back."

Somebody else said: "Next time you come at me about this, I'm going to put you on the ground. Every time I see you. I mean it."

They didn't give anything back.

A week after that she got knocked down outside the east gate — I only heard it secondhand — and came up with her ankle twisted, and sat on the curb, and nobody walking past stopped. She got herself to the health center on her own. That was the part I actually believed. It fit the rest of it.

Then came the version where she tries.

She picked up shifts at a coffee place on Highland. She did weekends at a boutique near the mall, and then a second job at a grocery store for a while, and it was all the same math every month and the math never worked. First the minimum payments, then the late fees, then the missed ones, then the calls. Then paper. Then someone from a collection agency started finding her at school — waited by the bike racks, asked around using her name, loud enough that people turned around.

By finals she looked like somebody who was being worn down by the hour.

And then she was gone. Just — not around. Not at the dining hall, not in the plaza, not in the classes she'd had. It wasn't a surprise exactly. It was more like a sound stopping.

Two, maybe three months later, Priya came back to the apartment with a bag of takeout and said, "Okay, so."

I looked up.

"She paid it all off. The whole thing plus interest."

Maya put her fork down. "The whole—"

"Every penny. Those loans are done."

"How."

"That's the good part." Priya sat on the arm of the couch. "She quit all the jobs. She's been working at a club downtown — like a nightclub, a real one. And there are these guys. Guys with money. Not one. Several."

Maya blinked. "Guys with money."

"Each one gives her a little, and a little from several of them is a lot, and now she's not behind on anything." Priya pulled up a photo and held the phone out so we could see it. Chloe getting out of a black car outside a building I didn't recognize. Coat, boots, hair done. Somebody handing her a shopping bag with a name on it I did recognize. "That was in front of the arts building. She's fine. She's better than fine. And here's the funny part — the same people who wouldn't stand next to her in line for coffee three months ago are suddenly texting her again. The two guys from the library? I saw them waiting outside her class."

Maya and I looked at each other.

I didn't have a single clean feeling about any of it. That's the truth. Not relief, not satisfaction, not pity. Just a long, flat, well-that's-not-right kind of thing.

"Not our problem," Maya said.

"No," I agreed.

She paid the resort. That closed it. Whatever she became after that wasn't mine to run.

The gossip didn't stop, though. It never does.

A few weeks later Priya came in with the next installment, and this time she didn't sit down first.

"Okay. So those guys? They know each other."

"What?"

"All of them. Not friends exactly, but the same circle — same money, same town. And two of them figured out they were both — you know. And when they figured it out, they figured out the other one. And they were not happy."

Maya's face went still.

"They hurt her," Priya said. "Bad. Her face — there's a cut. From here down." She drew it on her own cheek, from under the eye to past the jaw. "And her leg. He broke it."

I didn't say anything.

"And the school found out. The club thing, the money, all of it, there was a hearing — she's out. She's not coming back."

Maya got up and went to the kitchen, and I heard the tap run longer than it needed to.

Here's what I kept coming back to, later, lying in bed with the light off. All of this was a chain that started with a card in a room. A card that wasn't hers. She didn't have to take it, and she didn't have to walk into that lobby, and she didn't have to stand up in front of thirty people and order. Any single fork in that road and she'd still be a person with a face and two working legs and a degree in front of her.

She picked every one of them. That was the thing I couldn't put down, and I couldn't have said it out loud anyway, because nobody was asking, and I had a final in the morning.

Finals week.

I stayed at the library until closing, which I almost never do, because the only quiet desk left in the building was the one on the fourth floor by the window and I got there late. They announced it over the speakers at eleven-twenty and I packed up slow and walked out the glass doors with my bag over my shoulder.

The quad was empty. Everyone sensible was inside.

I cut across the walkway toward the residence hall, and about a hundred feet in I got that feeling on the back of my neck. Not noise. Something thinner than noise — the sound of a shoe on wet concrete behind me, timed a half-step off mine.

I stopped.

The footsteps stopped.

I turned my head.

Something cold pressed against the side of my throat.

"Don't move."

I almost jumped out of my skin anyway. Every muscle in my body went one direction and then the metal bit in and I stopped, frozen, chin up, my whole body one long line of don't.

She had her arm across me from behind. I couldn't see her face until I turned my head a little further, and when I did, I thought for half a second that it was someone else wearing her.

Her face was covered in small scars — thin, more than a dozen, scattered where they'd healed crooked. Under her left eye a single line ran all the way across her cheek to her right ear. It was still raised. It looked like something drawn on her and then left.

"What do you want," I said.

My voice came out steady. I don't know why.

"What do I want." She was smiling. It didn't go with her eyes. "Guess."

"Chloe—"

"Guess."

"You don't have to do this."

"I'm going to kill you." She said it like a fact she'd had time to get used to. "You did this to me. All of it. You put a card in a room and you watched me walk into it and you never said a word. You never said one word. So now I'm done, and I'm not going alone."

The blade pressed in another fraction.

I swallowed. My heart was going fast enough that I could hear it, and the sound of it made everything else quieter, and I made myself talk anyway.

"Okay."

She didn't move.

"If it's about what happened, I'll say it. I'm sorry. That's true." My mouth was dry. "And the money — the fifty-one eight, whatever's left, I'll give it back to you. All of it. I'll do it tomorrow."

"You'll give it back."

"I will. I'll transfer it, I'll write it, whatever you want."

"And then what." Her voice had gone very thin, which was worse than the smile. "You think I don't know what happens after that. I take your money and you go straight to the police, and it's the same thing over again, and I'm in a room with a phone I can't use. I'm not doing that again."

"I'm not—"

"You're not what." She laughed, and it was a bad sound. "You're standing here telling me to trust you."

And then, quieter, like she was explaining it to herself: "It's clean if I do this. I go to prison, I get three meals, a bed, a locked door, no one coming at me in the street, no one calling my phone. That's more than I've got now. That's the best offer I've had in a year."

She wasn't raving. That was the part I couldn't get around, even with a knife on my throat. She'd thought about it. She'd done the numbers.